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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I recently read an article (which I can’t find now) that said, We don’t log in to check our health data as much as we do our financial data. This was a pretty interesting statement considering a few days back I posted this tweet about PHR and being an active patient:

I want to spend some time thinking about the motivation for a healthy individual to become an active patient. #PHR#ePatient

There’s certainly a place for software that connects patients with their doctors for things like scheduling an appointment, paying their bills, requesting prescription refills, and even doing e-visits. In fact, one of my advertisers recently launched an enterprise patient portal that has these types of features (check out this video which describes their feature set).

There’s no arguing that these types of connections to doctors are valued and something that patients would love to have. Many doctors are still on the fence about them, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing more and more of these types of services over time. However, while being really great features they still don’t solve the problem of a healthy patient wanting to log in to this portal regularly.

I think one game changer when it comes to PHR will likely be around an emerging set of devices which track our health. For example, over on Smart Phone Healthcare I recently wrote about Tracking Fitness and Activity Levels on Your Smartphone. These devices will track your steps, calories, heart rate, and sleep data and upload it to a centralized location where you can see all that data and watch your fitness and activity levels change over time. Plus, I believe we’re just getting started with collecting this type of data. You can easily see this moving to blood sugar levels, cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.

Now imagine that all of this data was available in your PHR. This type of data would be constantly updated and seeing the graphs of this health data over time is something that I’d login to check as much as I do my financial data.

Previously, I’d always been a bit down on these types of tracking devices. I’ve argued that we’re missing that link for doctors to be able to do something with the data that patients are collecting. I still think this is the case, but just because your doctor might not use the data a patient collects doesn’t mean it can’t be valuable to the patient to collect and see that data regularly. Plus, once EHR software and doctors are ready to digest the data, you’ll be ready as well.

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